Most modern medical care facilities utilize computer implemented medical monitors to monitor the condition of patients. Medical sensors transmit physiological parameters associated with each patient to a medical monitor which is being watched by medical personnel. A physiological parameter may include both graphical and textual data indicating a life-sign of a patient. For example, a medical sensor such as an electrocardiogram might transmit both an electrocardiograph wave form and an associated pulse rate to a medical monitor. Medical monitors are typically located at each bed-side and at central locations such as nurses stations. The bed-side medical monitors may be stand-alone units or networked units. Networked medical monitors transmit data onto a network so that centrally located medical monitors, as well as other bed-side medical monitors, may display data relating to multiple patients. A bed-side medical monitor's main task is to display physiological parameters that are transmitted from local medical sensors, that is, those medical sensors that are directly connected to the bed-side display monitor. Often times, however, a clinician will want to view a physiological parameter for one patient while attending to another patient. In this case, the clinician must program a bed-side display monitor to display local parameters as well as select remote parameters.
A centrally located medical monitor's main task is to display physiological parameters that are transmitted from medical sensors associated with local beds, that is, those beds that are logically grouped with the centrally located medical monitor. Medical care facilities containing a large number of beds typically divide the beds into logical groups called wards or units, then provide one or more centrally located medical monitors for each unit. Because only a limited number of parameters can be displayed on each centrally located medical monitor at one time, medical personnel have to decide which parameters they would like to monitor and then program the central display monitor accordingly.
Current approaches for programming a medical monitor are non-intuitive. Clinicians, who may be novice computer users, are forced to traverse multiple levels of menus in order to select a particular parameter for display. If the clinician would like to have the selected parameter displayed in a particular area or zone of the display monitor, the clinician must then traverse the menus a second time to select a particular zone. To assign colors, sounds, or other attributes to the display of a selected parameter, the clinician must traverse the menus yet again. Current approaches tend to present the computer network as static by allowing a clinician to select a parameter for display when, in reality, the parameter is no longer available for display. Additionally, some prior approaces offer only a predefined list of parameters that is the same for each bed-side. In reality, a computer network is dynamic--at any time, patients can be checked in and out of the medical care facility, and different types of medical sensors can be connected to or disconnected from the computer system. It is important that monitor programming approaches account for this dynamic information.